Boring, complex and important: a recipe for the web's dire future

Revealing our brains' inner workings by shining a light on flies

This article was taken from the May 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.

Do fruit flies feel guilty? Gero Miesenböck, professor of physiology at Oxford University, is exploring possible answers by literally shining light on the subject. Miesenböck, 46, is a pioneer of the science of optogenetics. Proposed by Francis Crick in 1999, and first demonstrated in the lab three years later by Miesenböck, optogenetics involves genetically modifying neurons in living creatures so they become light-sensitive, and then controlling them by switching a light on and off. "Neuroscience has been able to observe the brain in great detail but was less able to tinker with the thing," he says. "Now we have a chance to play with the symbols in the brain and see what they do, like a code breaker."

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Miesenböck assigns light-sensitive characteristics to groups of cells in fruit flies' brains. He then switches a light on when they venture near a certain smell. Those that avoid that smell later are dissected to see which cells were sensitive to light. The result has been the discovery of a 12-neuron system that manages the flies' self-critical feelings, he says -- "the superego, if you like".